Sweet Nell: The Story of Australia's Rose
Sweet Nell: The Story of Australia’s Rose is a 6-part, richly told narrative podcast about fame, forgetting, and the women who built Australian theatre long before their stories were written out of it.
Hosted by acclaimed performer and producer Ali McGregor, the series traces the extraordinary life of Eleanor “Nellie” Stewart - the most celebrated stage star of 19th-century Australia. Sweet Nell was adored, scrutinised, scandalised, and mythologised in her own lifetime, yet today her name has all but vanished from public memory.
Each episode blends immersive storytelling, archival research, and personal reflection, following Nellie from gaslit pantomimes and grand opera houses to international tours, secret marriages, artistic reinvention, and enduring love. Along the way, we meet the formidable women who came before her, the theatre dynasties that shaped a nation’s cultural life, and the precarious realities of making art while navigating class, motherhood, and public expectation.
The series opens at sea in 1893, with Nellie travelling alone with her baby, poised between past and future, fame and anonymity, an image that echoes through generations of artists, including the host herself.
Sweet Nell is not just a biography. It is an exploration of legacy, adaptation, and why some stories are remembered while others quietly disappear. Across six episodes, this podcast asks a simple question with far-reaching consequences: who decides what, and who we keep?
Sweet Nell: The Story of Australia's Rose
Episode 4: Alone on the High Cs
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In this deeply personal episode, I trace Nellie Stewart’s return to Australia in 1893 - not as the adored “Rose of Australia,” but as a new mother travelling incognito across the world with her six-week-old baby. From triumph and tragedy at Melbourne’s Princess Theatre to a gruelling 45-day voyage aboard the SS Doric, this chapter reveals a woman balancing ambition, secrecy, love and survival.
As I uncover a long-forgotten shipboard journal and search in vain for her daughter’s birth certificate, the distance between performer and private woman narrows. Alone on the high seas, Nellie’s story becomes one of resilience, reinvention and the cost of returning to the stage when everything has changed
Recorded on the traditional lands of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong Peoples of the Kulin Nation, written and hosted by Ali McGregor. Script editing by Maeve Marsden and musical excerpts by Matthew Floyd Jones.
This podcast was created wth the generosity of The Frank Van Straten Fellowship, supported by ‘The Van Straten and Turley Foundation', with the help and guidance of Claudia Funder at the Australian Performing Arts Collection. Massive thanks also go to Elaine Marriner of Marriner Theatres for the initial and continued inspiration and support.
https://www.alimcgregor.com/nellie